Kalsa/workshop/deepening/benchmark.md

Institutional Depth Benchmark

Kalsa's target is causal parity with AetheriaLore's strongest institutional work, not imitation of Aetheria's setting, voice, ontology, or page count.

Qualitative Dimensions

Review each major institution or system across these dimensions:

1. material or social function;
2. legible authority and enforcement limits;
3. recruitment, training, rank, compensation, discipline, succession, and exit;
4. resources, records, places, tools, maintenance, and supply chains;
5. formal doctrine versus governing practice;
6. beneficiaries, payers, excluded people, and refusal costs;
7. dependencies, clients, rivals, funders, imitators, and parasites;
8. variation by class, region, lineage, language, and magical capacity;
9. historical crises and path dependence;
10. internal contradiction and active factions;
11. consequences when players help, harm, capture, expose, or reform it;
12. provenance: adopted fact, attributed belief, inference, or unresolved design.

Use the following review scale as a discussion aid:

• 0 — absent: the note supplies no usable answer.
• 1 — asserted: an answer is named but its mechanism or consequence is unsupported.
• 2 — causal: actors, resources, limits, and downstream effects are clear enough to reason from.
• 3 — stress-tested: the answer survives conflict, subordinate experience, historical pressure, and interaction with neighboring institutions.

The numbers are derived review state. They are not lore, and their sum is not a depth score.

Situated Knowledge Benchmark

When a pass touches magic, gods, history, relics, peoples, or another subject with backstage truth, also test the inhabitant model:

1. What repeatable phenomenon or evidence does the tradition encounter?
2. Which culture, institution, lineage, text, witness, or synthesis owns the explanation?
3. What names and translations does it use, and which registers or rivals reject them?
4. What archives, instruments, rites, cases, fieldwork, or testimony let the model survive one speaker?
5. Who teaches it, funds it, publishes it, inherits its duties, disciplines it, and can leave or refuse it?
6. Which rival and subordinate models explain the same evidence differently?
7. In what tested domain is it genuinely useful, and what characteristic blind spot follows from its tools, jurisdiction, patronage, or history?
8. Which separate institution may certify, govern, judge, operate, worship, or punish on the basis of the model, and what can scholarship not decide?
9. What is common, learned, restricted, disputed, or unknown to the people involved?
10. Can Kalsa/Public/ present the argument through inhabitant knowledge without revealing the backstage taxonomy or flattening disagreement into fog?

A local synonym for an author label scores absent. A theory becomes causal only when its evidence, reproducing institution, interests, usable predictions, and failure shape are visible. Incomplete does not mean vague; it means bounded enough to be right, wrong, revised, funded, suppressed, and used in play.

Parity Condition

Kalsa reaches institutional parity when:

• every high-impact institution is at least causal in every critical dimension;
• its defining contradictions and player-facing consequences are stress-tested;
• cross-institution dependencies have clear owner notes instead of duplicated summaries;
• a hostile or marginal reading exposes perspective and conflict rather than a missing material mechanism;
• new events can be derived from the system without workshop explanation;
• comparison against representative Aetheria notes finds comparable causal density even when Kalsa uses fewer or shorter pages.

Aetheria Reference Sample

Observed on 2026-08-22 in F:\Projects\AetheriaLore\Aetheria\Worldbuilding:

• 146 non-index Markdown notes;
• about 58,919 words and 849 Obsidian wikilinks;
• representative deep institutional notes include:
  • Post-Elysium/Factions/Death Monkey Explosives.md;
  • Post-Elysium/Factions/Megiddo.md;
  • Post-Elysium/Factions/Wavecrafters.md;
  • Post-Elysium/Factions/House Valence.md;
  • Post-Elysium/Factions/Daedal Houses.md;
  • Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Minor/Rossum & Douglas.md.

Those metrics establish scale and supply comparison candidates. They are not quotas. Recalculate structural diagnostics with:

.\scripts\lore\measure-depth.ps1